MIT Research News' Journal
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
Monday, January 27th, 2014
| Time |
Event |
| 5:00a |
When the job search becomes a blame game
Searching for a job is tough — and the nature of the hiring process in the United States makes matters far tougher, and more emotionally fraught for workers, than it needs to be.
That is the central assertion of MIT’s Ofer Sharone in a new book based on his in-depth study of the American and Israeli white-collar labor markets, which operate very differently.
In the U.S., Sharone says, job hunts emphasize the presentation of personal characteristics; job seekers play, in his terms, a “chemistry game” with prospective employers. In Israel, by contrast, the job-placement process is more formally structured and places greater emphasis on objective skills.
As a result, white-collar workers in the U.S. are more likely to take their job-market struggles personally, and find it harder to sustain searches.
“It’s very painful to keep getting rejected,” says Sharone, an assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Moreover, widespread self-help advice for job seekers, he believes, “unintentionally exacerbates this problem” by encouraging unemployed workers to believe they entirely control their job-search outcomes.
Examples of American workers taking their job-search struggles personally abound from the interviews Sharone conducted during his research. Consider Nancy, a former venture capitalist, who told Sharone that when she struggled to find a new position, “I started to feel there was something wrong with how I interviewed. And then, something wrong with me.” Chris, a marketer, confided to Sharone that “the hardest thing is esteem, confidence. It’s killed.” And sometimes job-search struggles turn into disastrous, all-consuming personal problems: Richard, an accountant unemployed for a year, attempted suicide, saw his marriage dissolve, and told Sharone that his job search was a “terrible emotional experience.”
All of this constitutes a significant social issue at a time when, according to estimates, 4.1 million Americans in the labor market have been unemployed for more than six months. Moreover, some studies have shown that these workers have a harder time attracting interest from employers as a result of their time out of work.
“These are people who never thought this could happen to them,” Sharone adds. “They are educated, they have experience, they are exactly the people our society makes out to be the winners.”
Hiring practices and job-seeking experiences
Sharone’s book, “Flawed System/Flawed Self: Job Searching and Unemployment Experiences,” has just been published by the University of Chicago Press.
A sociologist by training, Sharone decided to conduct a comparative study of hiring practices in the two countries in part because they both have thriving information-economy sectors: The San Francisco area and Tel Aviv have the world’s densest concentrations of high-tech firms, for instance. In researching the book, he conducted scores of in-depth interviews with job seekers, was given access to job-search support organizations, and analyzed job-search literature in both places.
This cross-cultural comparison led Sharone to conclude that while joblessness is almost always difficult, it is experienced differently in different national contexts.
“In both [the U.S. and Israel], job seekers become demoralized, but at different rates,” Sharone says. “This is an unintended consequence of the hiring system.”
In Israel, companies seeking employees more often outsource hiring to third-party firms that screen applicants, conduct pre-employment tests, and sharply winnow the pool of candidates before face-to-face contact between prospective employers and employees. Israelis may feel those tests are unfair, but tend to blame the system for their inability to get rehired.
“In Israel, nobody was blaming themselves,” Sharone says. By contrast, a majority of Americans he talked to “would confide fears about themselves.”
Intriguingly, Sharone’s research reveals that Americans do not blame themselves for losing jobs in the first place, but soon look inward if they do not land new ones.
“People talk about the layoffs in external terms, about outsourcing, or corporate restructuring, or the economy,” Sharone says. “But things really switch when they talk about why they are having trouble finding new jobs.”
Often, job-hunting Americans soon find fault with their own personalities, networking skills, or lack of career direction, and become distressed by the “emotional labor” of looking for work.
In Sharone’s estimation, the litany of popular books and materials offering advice to job seekers along self-help lines may make things worse for the long-term unemployed: Along with helpful tips about cover letters or job interviews, he says, come self-help dictums about taking control of one’s life that are meant to motivate and inspire but can backfire by reinforcing workers’ fears that they are to blame for their own job-market problems.
“This advice resonates in the U.S. because it fits the institutions of hiring,” Sharone observes. However, he adds, “It can backfire when applied to someone who is six months unemployed, and looking tirelessly for a job.”
A new research program to study job seekers
Sharone’s work has been well received by other scholars. Michele Lamont, a sociologist at Harvard University, calls the new book “an insightful analysis of the experience of unemployment in the United States and Israel,” and says it “illuminates the aspects of job-searching experiences that are generally ignored or misunderstood.”
Sharone’s follow-up work aims to find new ways of assisting the unemployed in the job-search process. “Nothing about these unemployment experiences is inevitable,” as he writes in the book.
To that end, Sharone has embarked on a new research program, called the Institute for Career Transitions, designed to study job-search problems in a new way. Working with economist Rand Ghayad of Northeastern University, Sharone is monitoring the job searches of more than 100 workers and matching many of them with career advisers in an effort to evaluate whether more personalized job-search support is effective.
“We want to research what are the most effective, most promising ways to support this group,” Sharone says. | | 5:00a |
How the ‘Matthew Effect’ helps some scientific papers gain popularity
Do scientific papers written by well-known scholars get more attention than they otherwise would receive because of their authors’ high profiles?
A new study co-authored by an MIT economist reports that high-status authorship does increase how frequently papers are cited in the life sciences — but finds some subtle twists in how this happens.
“We found that there was an effect of status,” says Pierre Azoulay, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and co-author of a paper on the subject, published this month in the journal Management Science. But that effect, he adds, is not “overwhelming.”
The study reports that citations of papers increase by 12 percent, above the expected level, when their authors are awarded prestigious investigator status at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), a major private research organization. However, certain kinds of research papers are boosted more than others by the increased prestige that accompanies the HHMI award, Azoulay notes.
“We find much more of an effect on recent papers, published in a short window before the prize,” Azoulay says. Moreover, he adds, the greatest gains come for papers in new areas of research, and for papers published in lower-profile journals. Younger researchers who had lower profiles previously were more likely to see a change as well.
“The effect was much more pronounced when there was more reason to be uncertain about the quality of the science or the scientist before the prize,” Azoulay observes.
Identifying the ‘Matthew Effect’
The paper, titled, “Matthew: Effect or Fable?” was co-authored by Azoulay, Toby Stuart of the University of California at Berkeley, and Yanbo Wang of Boston University. The title references the “Matthew Effect,” a term coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton to describe the possibility that the work of those with high status receives greater attention than equivalent work by those who are not as well known.
Positively identifying this phenomenon in scientific paper citations is difficult, however, because it is hard to separate the status of the author from the quality of the paper. It is possible, after all, that better-known researchers are simply producing higher-quality papers, which get more attention as a result.
But Azoulay, Stuart, and Wang have a way to address this issue: They look at papers first published before the authors became HHMI investigators, then examine the citation rates for those papers after the HHMI appointments occurred, compared to a baseline of similar papers whose authors did not receive HHMI appointments.
More specifically, each paper in the study is paired with what Azoulay calls a “fraternal twin,” that is, another paper published in the exact same journal, at the same time, with the same initial citation pattern. For good measure, the authors of the papers in this comparison group were all scientists who had received other early-career awards.
In all, from 1984 through 2003, 443 scientists were named HHMI investigators. The current study examines 3,636 papers written by 424 of those scientists, comparing them to 3,636 papers in the control group.
“You couldn’t tell them [the pairs of papers] apart in terms of citation trajectories, up until the time of the prize,” Azoulay says.
Beyond the overall 12 percent increase in citations, the effect was nearly twice as great for papers published in lower-profile journals. Alternately, Azoulay points out, “If your paper was published in Cell or Nature or Science, the HHMI [award] doesn’t add a lot.”
Toward the scientific study of scientists
Other researchers think the study adds value to the burgeoning data-based literature on the work of scientists. Benjamin Jones, a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management who has read the paper, says the study contains “compelling empirical evidence” and “strongly suggests that eminence itself matters” when it comes to recognition of published papers.
Moreover, Jones adds, it is conceivable that the careers of scientists “might diverge substantially on account of the Matthew Effect, rather than due to the quality of the work itself. This possibility, among others, are interesting avenues for further research, motivated by Azoulay, Stuart, and Wang’s findings.”
As Azoulay acknowledges, scientists themselves are not always entirely comfortable with studies of the citations given papers, since some scientists may feel the quality of some papers may not be represented by citation data in the first place; worthy research can escape wide notice for extended periods of time.
Still, Azoulay and other scholars have used citation data to glean new insights and quantify observations about the scientific enterprise. For instance, drawing on his own proprietary database of more than 12,000 life scientists, Azoulay has found that bioscience advances are encouraged by longer-term grants with more freedom for researchers, and that physical proximity among scientists increases citation rates, among other things.
The study behind this month’s paper was funded in part by the National Science Foundation. |
|